I’ve been avoiding replying in this thread, but what the hell, it’s my birthday (66), and I’m feelin’ a little frisky today. The cotton / rayon discussions are always good ones.
For the record, I switched from cotton to rayon about 4 years ago. The natural vs man made debate is something I’ve always found to be odd.
VG - man made
PG - man made
Nic - man made extraction process
Flavors - man made
Coils - man made alloys
Tanks - man made alloys, glass, plastics
Virtually everything we ingest, vaping is man made.
I just don’t get it.
But like everything else in vaping, the outcome is a series of personal tastes & choices. That part is easy to get.
Thanks, and totally agree about not wanting to inhale burned rayon or cotton!
I’ve only had one dry hit, early on, in my 5+ years of vaping. It was with cotton. It was an idiot attack of galactic proportions. I can’t blame it on the cotton.
With rayon, I get the slightest hint, taste-wise, that the wick on the verge of needing juice. I haven’t had a dry hit with rayon (knock on wood) but I can’t imagine it would be worse than that cotton dry hit flame thrower that nailed me once.
I had a brief period with the CE4’s & Egos, but thankfully never had a dry hit on those silica wicks. It didn’t take long and I moved on to the Nauti Mini & MVP 20. I still have a few Nauti Minis in the stash, and a couple years worth of coils. That’s my 9th inning backup plan, in case rebuilding gets too difficult in my rapidly accelerating state of decay…lol
@Sprkslfly, when you consider the part of rayon you distrust (making into a liquid) I suggest you imagine the purification of the base cellulose liquid as likely being critical to the success of it then being spun into tiny fibers. Impurities would surely result in a fail. My worry about Rayon was any solvent used in making cellulose source material liquid remaining in the final product (trace amounts).
Surely it’s something highly volatile like hexane (more likely a strong acid+solvent). Any information about the solvent(s) used? Tests for residual solvent levels as a Quality Assurance (Human Safe)? Any MSDS sheets on Rayon (the type we use)? Keep in mind we all understand even the Beauty Store has two types of “cellu-cotton” …one we don’t use. Why?
I want to trust modern Vendors of “Vaping Rayon” have worked to understand this (an actual scientific investigation?). Do we have any contacts from the Industry willing to talk about this? …or are they just buying up all the Beauty Store inventories and repackaging :cynical_grin:
A. I’m glad you ‘get’ that it’s the liquid part, that I’m hung up on! chuckles
B. If it was this “wonderful, ‘largely natural’, entity” from the start, then it wouldn’t need to be ‘de-solidified’ to turn it into usable fibres. They would simply be ‘cleaning it’ (akin to what they do cotton) IMO.
It’s a poor ‘comparison’, but (the best I can do ATM) it would be like collecting a ton of pollen from flowers, then chemically processing it, and calling it “honey, from natural sources (but Man-made)”.
Trying not to beat a dead horse here, but answered because you tagged me!
Whatever other people want to use (for wicking) doesn’t matter to my body, so I’m good (since I finally got the information I needed to make a decision relevant to me! )
This thread made that possible, so again, I’m indebted for a healthy exchange of ideas.
No thank YOU! I learned lots …maybe relearned something, as I remember from my early years of TV (the three channel variety) how the Japanese had invented a way to spin silk mechanically …maybe it was in a magazine. It’s now a 100 year old process so I have to guess there’s been plenty of changes, both mechanical and chemical (images of that tiny spinneret shooting out spider silk (ok worm silk). This could be a whole story …investigative Vaper News where are you? :chuckle:
It’s funny that PBS “didn’t count” as a child (outside of Sesame Street and the Electric Company)!!
Nowadays, if there were only the same 4 channels, all I would watch is PBS.
They technically have 4 types, the one we don’t use is plain old cotton, then they have both types wrapped around a cardboard tube for some reason in the other two versions lol
Reading this, I can’t help thinking about every cigarette filter that I’ve smoked the first 1/16" into my lungs. I have no idea what those are made from. To me it makes worrying about the very rare event of a slight singe to a Vaping wick seem insignificant. I’m not trying to downplay this discussion, it just really makes me revisit the decades of inhaling burnt cigarette filter material.
Rayon is treated with sodium hydroxide, and carbon disulfide one of the solvents that can be used is sulfiric acid, which is then removed with sodium sulfide and finally the rayon is bleached sodium hypochlorate or peroxide before being washed
Alot of this is really nasty stuff I wouldn’t want to vape either it would be nice to know how much traces are left-over
Cotton would have it’s own traces too though like heavy metals, proteins, oils, waxes and possibly some organic acids
some cottons are chemically treated for degumming, scouring and bleaching
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